getting off this mailing list

[Ed Cogburn]

Bob Nielsen wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 03:50:44PM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
>> Stephen R Laniel wrote:
>> 
>> > On Sat, Jul 02, 2005 at 04:18:56AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
>> >> No offense guys, but this argument is starting to sound just a
>> >> *little*
>> >> strange.  :)  It doesn't matter which is "better" to use, procmail or
>> >> fetchmail, because truthfully, to an end user they both *suck* as far
>> >> as ease-of-use (sorry, but I've used both).
>> > 
>> > I realize the point you're making, but I'd like to point out
>> > that fetchmail and procmail are two totally different
>> > programs serving totally different needs:
>> 
>> 
>> Yep, you got me on that, they do different things, sorry.  Since
>> discovering kmail & knode in KDE, I haven't used either one, nor anything
>> like them for years.
>> 
>> 
>> > I agree that procmail and fetchmail have bad UI. But I think
>> > we could build a good UI on top of both -- which would be
>> > good, because they're both infinitely expressive tools for
>> > handling their specific tasks. They each do one thing and do
>> > it well -- which is what open-source tools are supposed to
>> > be about.
>> 
>> Well.... I would argue that any good idea is good, but usually only in
>> moderation.  :)
>> 
>> Given that fetchmail is nothing more than a shallow wrapper around the
>> POP3 internet mail transfer protocol, I don't think a command-line tool
>> like that is sacrosanct, especially for a GUI environment like GNOME or
>> KDE, where the command-line methodolgy for program-to-program
>> communication is
>> actually inferior and less flexible.  Its like saying we should right a
>> GUI frontend for ls, rather than simply make the system calls to collect
>> the directory information directly from whatever tool you're using to
>> manage
>> files.  :)  If you're using mignight commander, or a GUI file management
>> tool like krusader, or konqueror, or whatever GNOME uses, do you still
>> want to be limited to only what ls can do for you?
>> 
> 
> The easiest way to use fetchmail is as a daemon, where no user interface
> is needed at all.


Agreed, but last time I used it, it couldn't be *setup* automatically, the
user still had to know some details that Ubuntu's typical newbie wouldn't
know.  Maybe its gotten better in that regard, it was years ago when I last
used it, so hopefully I'm out of date on that....